TeRRIFICA, standing for Territorial Responsible Research and Innovation Fostering Innovative Climate Action, is a European project aiming at developing Innovative Climate Action through stakeholder engagement and cocreation. In detail, TeRRIFICA’s goal is to identify and develop innovative actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change.
For this, a variety of actors from politics, science, businesses, education and civil society organizations will take part in developing action plans at local levels. Finally, the results will be transferred to other regions in Europe, while different formats ensure to broaden the experience by involving a wide range of stakeholders.
The TeRRIFICA method is to develop co-creation processes in six European pilot regions1: scientists, civil society organizations, policy-makers, education actors and businesses are working together to co-design, cocreate knowledge, and co-experiment solutions addressing experienced climate change effects. The pilotregions are seen as “living labs”, as the thinking and experiences are continually evolving.
Stakeholders’ engagement and co-creation are at the heart of TeRRIFICA, as we believe involving people who are directly affected will not only foster multiple innovative formats, but will also ensure sustainable and transferable results.
Why a guide on engagement and co-creation for climate mitigation and adaptation measures?
Multi-stakeholder engagement processes and co-creation activities have major advantages: they produce results that are truly adapted to the reality of concerned people and thus allow more sustainable changes. Involving stakeholders to develop innovative climate mitigation and adaptation actions is even more relevant as climate change is obviously global, but also highly contextualized, local and often requires changes in the society
However, co-creation between various stakeholders is not an easy path. The literature already identifies many barriers to advanced multi-stakeholder collaboration3. And addressing the topic of climate change may also add to the complexity – for example, the belief that climate change may seem too big to get involved. Thus, TeRRIFICA focuses on involving stakeholders via their own experience with climate change effects as an approach to break down the complex topic.
The guide therefore aims to:
- Foster stakeholders’ engagement and co-creation within the context of climate mitigation and adaptation.
- Provide some (non-)prescriptive ideas, recommendations and methodologies – they are a “starting point” to help stakeholder engagement and co-creation processes within climate change policymaking in the pilot regions.
- Disseminate “good practices”, i.e. some methodologies and experimentations that may be transferable to other regions in Europe to co-create measures tackling climate change.
